I think the point of the art is to show people how difficult it is to do the best you can with the tools available, and also to instruct them how to over-adjust with those tools and ease off them. To over-steer and then realign the direction of flight. What you're suggesting is: Give everyone an automatic transmission so no one ever shifts gears at the wrong time. What this game shows is: Here is how you shift gears before a curve, and what to expect if you shift too soon or too late. That is a fantastically more complicated and important thing to take away from a simulation than, "if we just turn everything on, problem solved."
> What you're suggesting is: Give everyone an automatic transmission so no one ever shifts gears at the wrong time. […]"if we just turn everything on, problem solved."
Not at all. A zero-covid strategy doesn't mean “Covid doesn't happen, nothing to do here”. It means locking down entire cities as soon as a few case of unknown origin are diagnosed, and doing so every time the situation occurs: it's not a one time medicine, you must be ready to to enact local lockdowns many times.
Australia, Vietnam, China, South Korea, etc. saved hundred thousands of lives by taking extreme measures super early on. Locking down 7 million people when 9 cases have been found is an extremely tough political decision to make, but it has been immensely successful (both from the health and economy point of view). The western world has been completely oblivious to this strategy since the beginning of the pandemic, and not allowing this kind of strategy in a game is just going to reinforce this idea that there is no alternative to the deadly “flatten the curve” strategy.
I agree with your basic view, and if I were a dictator with absolute power, that's exactly what I'd do. NZ and Australia are "the western world", but they happen to be sparsely populated islands. Vietnam and China are totalitarian dictatorships. South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are to their credit more rational and law-abiding, but they've also struggled with surges after they thought they had a handle on it.
I was an advocate for full lockdown in the US two weeks before the government even acknowledged the problem. I was already in quarantine a week before they did, and we isolated on a farm for a year until we got both shots. But the reality is we're in a country where we can't even convince people to get the vaccine now, much less skip spring break.
I don't think it's sending a message that total lockdown isn't an option. In fact, it's an option in the game. Lockdown in EU countries was much more severe than it was in the US. And Czechia is a landlocked nation at the heart of Europe, so closing borders is a wild and drastic thing in that context... much more so than in NZ, for example, which has rightly been called the "bolt-hole of billionaires" for the apocalypse.
I agree that we could have stopped this in its tracks if we had locked down Seattle and New York completely at the end of 2/2020. But I suspect it would have ended up in rural Missouri eventually anyway. And once it's endemic and the only option is to flatten the curve, there's no point in a simulation of a scenario that had no basis in reality, and there's still a lot of value in teaching people what flattening the curve means: preemptively locking down and closing before things get astronomically out of hand.
> Vietnam and China are totalitarian dictatorships. But the reality is we're in a country where we can't even convince people to get the vaccine now, much less skip spring break.
Not American so I can't judge about there, but in Europe, most countries closed restaurants and theaters for almost 6 months, schools for more than 3 months, people where submitted to curfews and harsh circulation restrictions (cannot go farther than 10km from your house without a justification and papers to prove so − in France for almost 4 month in total). and borders where closed for months (my brother in the UK couldn't practically come to France fro the 5 first months of this year). And people where sent to jail for not respecting those restrictions. It's not like the western world acted like “freedom-loving countries”, overall there were much more, and much longer freedom limitations in France, Italy and other European countries than there were in China.
The island vs continental countries is also a fallacy, there's been as many death in Cyprus and Malta (1.5M inhabitant together) than in NZ, Singapore, Vietnam and Taiwan grouped (more than 130M people living there). What's their excuse?
